Vivek Kaul - Easy Money. The greatest Ponzi scheme ever and how it threatens to destroy the global financial system (2015).pdf

(2267 KB) Pobierz
To
Ma and Papa, for letting me be!
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
1. Same Old Same Old!
2. Some Are More Equal than Others
3. Easter Without a Good Friday: The AAA Bubble
4. The Mad Cow Disease
5. The British Screwed US
6. Print Money, Buy Tomato Ketchup
7. The Yellowstone Effect
8. The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same
9. Of Currency War, Inflation, and Agatha Christie
10. That Four-Letter Word Called ‘Risk’
11. Conclusion: ‘Pure Intellectual Masturbation’
12. Epilogue: Some Ponzi Schemes Are Best Left Untouched
13. Easy Money: The End?
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Vivek Kaul
Praise for the Easy Money series
Copyright
Foreword
n the early twenty-first century, we tend to think of the money we know as a
fact of life, as if it always existed in its current form and always will. But that
is not true at all. Money changes. The ancient world’s carved stone wheels
became stamped circles of precious metal which became pieces of paper that
could be printed at will by politicians which became bits of data packaged into
baskets of sub-prime real estate loans that could be manipulated by computers
acting without human intervention.
I have been reading Easy Money from the first volume, which looked back to
money’s Garden of Eden, to this volume, which sorts out, step by complex step,
the global challenges facing today’s financial system. And there’s one simple
conclusion a reader can reach by the end of Vivek Kaul’s series: Money is
broken now and needs to change.
Money has been broken at other times in history, usually when a society and
its technology stretch the existing concept of money beyond anything it can
handle. This is where Easy Money finally leaves off – at today’s breaking point.
The problem with money right now is that it is dumb. In that sense, money
has never evolved past its genetic origins – it has always been dumb. A US
dollar, whether paper or in electronic form, has no smarts of its own at all. It
does not know what it is, where it has been, or where it is going. The only reason
it is effective is that the person or machine on each end of the transaction is
educated enough to identify a real dollar and calculate its value. The smarts in a
money exchange are in humans’ brains or computer programs. The smarts are
not in the money.
Credit cards did not solve that. When banks created credit cards in 1958, the
necessary electronic smarts to make the system work were extremely expensive,
and the computers were the size of a room. So credit cards developed as dumb
rectangles of plastic with numbers on them. The magnetic strip – which has not
changed since its invention in the 1960s – carries a little more information but
has no smarts of its own. Chips in cards similarly carry information that
I

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin